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Online Sales Make Hot Tickets Harder to Get

Elizabeth Bohl, left, wasnt able to get Jonas Brothers tickets for her daughter Emily, 11.Credit
Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Want to see U2 play at your local stadium this fall? How much are you willing to pay?

The concert business is booming, with top tours grossing more each year. But as the economy constricts, consumer frustration is beginning to reverberate throughout the industry. Fans complain that the once simple process of getting tickets has been transformed into a complex and expensive digital chore.

U2’s show on Sept. 24 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., was an “instantaneous sellout” through Ticketmaster on Monday morning, according to the promoter, Live Nation. Just as quickly, however, thousands of listings flooded any-price-goes sites like TicketsNow.com, a Ticketmaster subsidiary where fans and brokers flip tickets, often at prices far above face value. One seller was asking $10,000 for a $253 seat near the stage.

Jonas Brothers fans faced a similar situation when the band’s five New York-area concerts sold out over the weekend. Elizabeth Bohl, a payroll manager from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., said she could not find tickets at list price or afford to take her daughter, Emily, 11, at scalpers’ rates.

“I’m not going to spend a month’s worth of groceries to get two tickets to see the Jonas Brothers,” Ms. Bohl said.

Two years after the repeal of New York State’s decades-old anti-scalping laws, the ticket marketplace has become a fiercely competitive game in which major corporations compete over resale prices with the fan next door, scalpers have a Washington lobbyist and thousands of tickets disappear in a fraction of a second.

“The public just feels that they’re not getting a fair shot, and in some cases they may not be,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert industry trade magazine.

Once bought by telephone or at box office windows, tickets for concerts are now mostly bought online, pitting ordinary consumers against a network of professional scalpers who use ever more sophisticated technology to scoop up large numbers of tickets in a flash. “Presales” deplete the supply by offering early tickets to fan-club members. To see the hottest shows, fans must keep track of presale schedules and authorization codes (which are sometimes even auctioned on eBay), and coordinate friends and family members in multicomputer strategies for shows in danger of a quick sellout.

After lobbying by ticket brokers to decriminalize reselling in the Craigslist era, many states in addition to New York have lifted restrictions on scalping, and large corporations have embraced what is called the secondary market for tickets, like eBay, which owns StubHub. New York’s scalping laws were softened in 2005 and have been suspended since 2007, allowing tickets for most large events to be resold at any price.

Connecticut and Minnesota also revised their laws in 2007 to permit reselling, and in June, the New York Legislature will have to formalize its repeal or the old restrictions will return. The lobbying in Albany has already begun.

“This is a huge consumer rip-off,” said Russ Haven, legislative counsel for the New York Public Interest Research group. “There is no benefit to consumers in unlimited scalping.”

Gary Adler, general counsel of the National Association of Ticket Brokers, a trade group representing high-volume ticket resellers, countered that his members operated with a published code of ethics and charged only what the market would bear.

“It’s supply and demand,” Mr. Adler said, adding that for plenty of less-buzzy shows brokers may have to unload tickets at less than face value.

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As recently as the mid-1990s, the concert industry was essentially a patchwork of small regional promoters, but consolidation has allowed a few large companies to dominate. And with sales of recorded music withering, artists have increasingly turned to touring for income. That, along with performers’ frustration over missing out on sales in the secondary market, has led to skyrocketing ticket prices, promoters and industry executives say. The average official price for one of the Top 100 tours was $67 last year, more than double that of a decade ago, according to Pollstar.

And the churning secondary market has muddied long-held beliefs in the concert industry about what constitutes fair trade.

“It’s a free-for-all,” said Arthur Fogel, head of global touring for Live Nation and U2’s longtime tour promoter. “When you are an artist charging $200, and you see that those tickets are getting sold for $400, and $200 is evaporating into an economy that you have no piece of, I don’t think that’s fundamentally fair. But it’s a reality we live with, no different than people illegally downloading music.”

Some performers scalp their own tickets, Mr. Bongiovanni said, although few will admit to it publicly for fear of appearing to fleece their fans.

“There are artists who hold back tickets from sale and deliver them to the secondary market,” he said. “They are sold directly to the brokers because artists can make more money that way.”

A spokesman for Live Nation said U2 never diverted tickets to resellers in this way. In a nod to the recession, U2 set the lowest price level for its current tour at $33. Many of those cheap seats are now being resold for hundreds more, but fans will have another chance for list-price seats in Chicago, New York and Boston when additional shows go on sale on Monday.

High-profile ticketing problems have focused scrutiny on the proposed merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, now under review by the Justice Department.

In February, Bruce Springsteen’s fans were redirected to TicketsNow from Ticketmaster though regularly priced seats were still available. Mr. Springsteen wrote a scathing public letter, and Ticketmaster apologized, citing a computer glitch. But three weeks later, the attorney general of New Jersey, Anne Milgram, announced a settlement with the company regarding more than 2,000 consumer complaints.

When a similar glitch last fall affected Phish fans trying to buy tickets to the band’s reunion concerts in Hampton, Va., many took to the Internet with vitriol. Looking back on it, Jack Lebowitz, an environmental lawyer in Glens Falls, N.Y., who in the 1990s helped write a book about Phish set lists, turned philosophical.

“A concert ticket should be for someone’s spiritual life-enhancing experience of art,” he said in a telephone interview. “Not just another commodity, another stock or mortgage, something people flip for the biggest profit.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Online Resales Pushing Tickets Far From Reach. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe